Not like the stuff I usually listen to but I’ve been giving this a few rotations:
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I’ve always liked the Sex Pistols song ‘Anarchy in the UK’ as I find it hilarious, and often actually laugh out loud when listening to it, primarily because of the parenthetical insertion at the end: “… and I want to be an anarchist! (and get pissed). Destroy!” I was talking to my partner about this yesterday and he said the song is about “the lyricist passing judgement on the ‘anarchist’” which seems about right. It’s all about the petty acts of ‘revolution’ (that aren’t really) that might, just maybe, bring about anarchy. Like giving someone the wrong time when they ask. Or holding up a line of traffic! I think we’ve all committed these small acts of subversion, that of course are utterly, mind-numbingly conventional (and unoriginal). Mine was buying a Tube ticket (in the days when you had to go up to the window and ask, this was before we had Oyster cards!) at Charing Cross and asking for a ticket to “St Pancreas“. Revolution! Indeed. The strange thing though is the other week I was buying some other train tickets for London and the guy working at the station at the ticket desk said “St Pancreas”, thinking I had misheard I ensured conversationally Or perhaps it really is St Pancreas and I’ve been wrong all this time… now that really would be subversive. I’d get out my Tube map and check but I’m too busy starting my own small revolution. I use Gwibber to keep up with the various micro-blogging (Twitter, Facebook updates, identi.ca etc) services and having just installed Ubuntu 11.04 ‘Natty Narwhal’ (which includes Gwibber by default) I thought now is a good time to work on some themes. The supplied themes – ‘ubuntu’ and ‘default’ plus those available in the gwibber-themes package – are good but I found they didn’t contain exactly what I needed so have now been creating some of my own that also integrate with the UI settings. The other day whilst out and about in town two people from our local Latter Day Saints (Mormon) church stopped us in the street with a bunch of questions like “do you believe in God?” “do you think there’s an afterlife?” etc. I’m usually polite to people like this – people who stop you on the street for various reasons [1] I mean – as they are just doing a job and these guys actually seemed like nice people! Though it’s a bit much before lunchtime. I’d only had 4 coffees by then! → view the rest of the post: As previously written about here I, like many others, thought there “must be” a way to solve the Eternity II puzzle… Not deluding myself that I would be the one to win the prize exactly (although there’s a possibility [1] I might have said during last year that I was “about 50% confident” that I would solve it…) but more that ‘surely’ it should be possible, that although no algorithm can exist that would solve ‘all’ problems of this class, that it could be solved by the combination of human intelligence and computing power. Stepping outside the system is what’s required to solve most problems of this type, and why computers are terrible at it (in general) and artificial intelligence is probably, not only light years away, but conceptually not actually possible. I was working with some images in GIMP and from the original photos (which represented ‘real life’ quite accurately) I wanted some slightly more dramatic “filmic” looking images perhaps for walls etc.
As always, if the image is to be printed etc then work with the highest resolution image you have (within reason!). [For these examples I've used a relatively small 640px JPG for the sake of the server Here’s some steps… → view the rest of the post: In this previous post I installed a kernel module for the Wacom Bamboo tablet under Ubuntu 10.10. With my laptop this was all working fine, but I now also have a separate monitor (a Samsung Syncmaster F2380 for anyone keeping track), it’s a widescreen monitor that allows landscape or portrait orientation by physically rotating the monitor screen. A graphics tablet works by “mapping” the screen (or window) area to the tablet surface, so how does it work when the tablet and screen have a different aspect ratio? I set out to get this working, with a semi-elegant solution… Here’s a poem, a haiku? by Jorge Luis Borges. (Quoted from websites such as this one – “criticism or review” of Borges under fair use as I understand it.)
I don’t know what this rather short poem is ‘really’ about and I didn’t read for any interpretations. [1] In my mind, it’s a chess board. A parting, not amicable (or not anticipated). A vestigial remainder. That things move on, people move on, but somewhere, you don’t, not quite. A suspension of a state of being, pending a future reanimation, or an indefinite freeze. You don’t know. Two events. This I believe (if real life were fiction) to be ‘foreshadowing’. An established literary technique. Life imitating art, etc. → view the rest of the post: |
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that it was said again, and there it was, St Pancreas. Is it a small act of subversion by a railway employee? A way of introducing some interest (and I use the word quite loosely) into an otherwise tedious day? Or perhaps this guy really thinks it is St Pancreas and no one has had the heart to set him straight!
